Wars in general and religious wars in particular, as well as migration of populations encompassing millions of people, always brought throughout history, to violence, conflicts, plagues, fallen regimes, famine and economic hardships.
2016 will go down in history as the year in which the Middle East crises tipped over into the west. Already, they are bringing change and far-reaching political turmoil.
And that's just the beginning.

The defeat that Iran and Hizballah suffered on May 6 in a battle at the Syrian village of Khan Touman showed they cannot win the war for Syria’s President Assad. Seven days after the clash, the commander of Hizballah’s forces in Syria, Mustafa Bader Al-din, was killed in a ground-to-ground missile strike near the Damascus international airport. Later claims by various sources that he was killed in the battle were attempts to conceal the two biggest military blows suffered by the Iranians and Hizballah in Syria.

On Thursday, March 17, not even four days after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the withdrawal of his country’s forces from Syria, he started redrawing its map and dividing up the country into independent federations that will be under Russian influence. He started by backing the Kurdish semiautomous state on the Turkish border.

The highly-advanced S-400 air defense missiles will also eventually be evacuated from Syria, said high-ranking officials in Moscow on Wednesday, March 17, according to an exclusive debkafile report. But their presence for now is crucial in view of the continuing Saudi buildup of warplanes in Turkey, close to the Syrian border. The Saudi deployment in Incirlik now totals 16 warplanes.

Assad is quietly scheming to get ISIS to voluntarily withdraw from Raqqa and other Syrian warfronts to Iraq, hoping to get in before the US-led coalition launches its projected battle to evict the Islamic State from its Syrian capital.

Putin, Rouhani and Assad plan to use the Syrian ceasefire loophole for further conquests. Their next targets are Idlib in the north, on the Turkish border and completing the takeover of the Syrian-Israeli and Syrian-Jordanian border strips in the South.

Obama and Putin have no intention of cutting Turkey and Saudi Arabia into their joint plans for the Syrian military conflict or future. Erdogan, while bitterly opposed to their sponsorship of the Kurds, will think twice before stepping into Syria.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan clearly took a calculated risk when he ordered a two-hour cross-border artillery bombardment Saturday, Feb. 13 of Syrian army forces positioned around the northern Syrian town of Azaz and the Kurdish YPG militia units which two days earlier took control of the former Syrian military air base of Minagh some six kilometers from the Turkish border. All eyes are now on Moscow. Much depends on Russia’s comeback for the artillery bombardment of its Syrian and Kurdish allies. It is up to Putin to decide when and how to strike back – if at all.

The US and Russia are in the process of a military buildup in the Kurdish areas of northern Syria. It is ranged along a narrow strip of land 85 km long, stretching from Hassakeh in the east up to the Kurdish town of Qamishli on the Syrian-Turkish border. Facing them from across that border is a parallel buildup of Turkish strength. This highly-charged convergence of three foreign armies along a tense borderland is reported here by debkafile’s military sources. It is too soon to determine whether the three are operating in sync or at odds.

Russia is preparing an anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) space for Syria. It consists of layer upon layer of overlapping sophisticated and lethal surface-to-air missile systems. Moscow is also planning to strengthen the Syrian-Turkish border defenses.

The northern Syria battlefield close to the Turkish border will have a greater impact on determining Syria’s future than any Security Council resolution. A very large mixed bag of combatants consists of Russia, the Kurdish YPG militia, most of the important rebel groups - including radical Sunni organizations tied to Al Qaeda, such as the Nusra Front and Ahram al-Sham - not to mention Iran and Shiite Hizballah and the jihadist Islamic State. So long as no one gains the upper hand, there will be progress in the talks starting next month for ending the war.